Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Lilian Rook     . . . '"I told you I don't know who that is." the ghost dourly lies to Petra. "And you ask too many questions of strangers. I don't know that you wouldn't have killed me if that man hadn't got to me first." he says, relenting only so far as to answer "Perfect Questions are answered by the universe. We live on the middle plane, and so that is where we watch.'

    . . . "You'll learn which ones you respect and which ones you don't, in time, but you are wiser to choose respect over hate to start with." He sighs at the mention of 'the kid'. "The young fighting the wars the old grew tired of. You and I are a dying breed, friend. We believe in adults taking care of things so children can grow up. If they fight our old battles, they'll only turn out like us." He smiles in rueful reminiscence. "That one said she was here to protect a friend of hers. Maybe some of them will be alright."

    The tracker plant goes off without a hitch

    . . . Arina keeps moving out of the room in a smooth, purposeful stride once she feels the paper, letting her operative training (in progress take over), pulls up her tablet, and reads the paper on its screen, obscured against her chest, so that she appears to be glancing over ops information. A few seconds later, she bites at her lip, stares down at her feet, and begins moving towards an exit.

    . . . "Belay that order, NAZCA seven, eight, nine. Return to Centaur two eight one. Detainee has fingered one of our people of interest as the First. Sounds like code olive found it for us. It's Fatal Black." He briefly spits, off-radio, "Crafty old bastard Gerart." then returns. "Asset is on site with partial contigent at Centaur two eight one. Prepare to verify. You are authorized to neutralize all hostiles that resist. Sol Gold must remain alive. If his story checks out, we'll retrieve the First and push back retrieval of the Third until tomorrow's timetable."
Lilian Rook     Rita puts on a tiny guilty smile, then does her best to look bored and casual until they're outside. No words just yet.'

    If Arina feels Rita's shadowing, Rita wouldn't know. It's possible, given her training, yet at the same time, the girl is so high strung by this already that her passive level of tension couldn't possibly go up as a giveaway. In much the same fashion Rita had entered, Arina winds her way back out of the command building without being stopped or checked; looked at even less, given she must be somewhat familiar by now, as she clearly stands out. She moves to the exit on the side facing the monument, being a likely destination for an attendee of Enlightened stature to choose in the course of their duties, then . . .

    "You can't be here." All of Arina's tension escapes in a single long exhalation at the sight of Rita, but it seems she's already spent that walk thinking. "I'm sorry Rita. I know if you're here, it must be for a good reason, but this really isn't something you should get involved in. When did you even arrive in the country? No, never mind that. I don't know how you got in here, but this place isn't safe for you, and this operation is going to be worse. I know you're strong, but you're a hero, not a soldier. This is different . . ."
Petra Soroka     Petra watches Arthur's Gamer Precision with awe, her own movements slowing down until she eventually drops her hands, acknowledging that she's just getting in the way. "How are you moving that quickly, even though it's freezing out here...?" She wonders aloud, inspecting up her mitten-ed hands helplessly.

    She pouts at Ai-Mökö. "That's stupid, we shouldn't be here to kill anyone. As long as we can help it."

<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou fuck, "They're after her, and now you Lilian..."

    Petra startles, staring directly at Lilian. "Why would they suddenly be after you?" She tucks her hands under her armpits, tentatively suggesting, "Is there some way we could use that to set this third party and the military down there against each other? Like, make it look like they're taking immediate action against Oreshnika, distracting both of them?"
Ishirou Ishirou knows he's /very/ much outmatched now, especially with that sniper.  Worse, he took a chance on who these people were and botched massively.  He swallows, realizing how bad of an error it was.  He's psychic but he's speaking out loud.  Is he arrogant or does he want this info known..?  

Doesn't matter, she has to know and he's going to have to start cleaning up.  Sniper will prevent him from flying, but he has other options.  Quietly he whispers, POD, deploy Drilltank."

Ishirou goes for the play.

He uses his electromagnetic hold to drop snow down from above to blind and moves erratically to try and avoid the shot as much as he can.  The Drill options deploy, attempting to ram the agent first before the flight unit parts detach and the drills connect.  

"Alright guess we're doing this.  I know your goal but not your game...and you're going to find her very hard to get, especially with you and your sniper about to have a very bad day," Cantio dropping in would free him up to dash for the sniper..."  

Maybe.  Assuming he doesn't die before he gets digging.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: How are you moving that quickly?

    "GAMING." Arthur says, emphatically. "I trained for THIS TYPE OF SHIT for my WHOLE LIFE!" His tone downshifts. "Also, getting your ass blasted by a fucking claymore mine warms them extremities with lots of blood."

>Arthur: Hey! They're after Lilian now!!

    Arthur jolts up from his tuning. "Shit. They're comin' after us here? Hang on a second." He leans back over his work.

    His hands surge with shining light, and he attempts to attune further to the celestial nature of this formation. It answers perfect questions about the universe. But is there enough geometric and stellar meta-machinery here to answer questions about this mountain range? If Arthur plunges enough extra energy and processing power into this Sagittarius-shaped solar spotter, can he get the archer's eyes to give him something of tactical value? This is the shape of a body, after all, and a body must have an immune system. He's careful not to interfere with the Question, but if he can get eyes on anything approaching Lilian now, he's gotta get that data and get it to the rest of the team.

    Ideally to someone like Petra, so that she can artillery-blast them with her mecha. Surely, Petra Soroka, tank-mech operator, uses that turret weapon to do very long-range attacks, and not something silly like melee. Right? Right???
Trudy Grimm     "I mean," Trudy shrugs lightly towards Petra, "I'm not here to kill anyone, but I do tend to accumulate dead people. It comes with the territory." She glances upward in thought while parsing out Ishirou's message, though. After a moment, she lets out a sigh and closes her eyes, drawing out the Grimoire. It rattles in its bindings, snapping open as soon as the buckle is unclasped and flipping through multitudes of pages.

    "They're after miss Rook because now they know miss Rook is here," she states flatly, "Her name doesn't quite carry the weight I think he was hoping it would." With her free hand, the witch extracts runes from the rapidly flipping pages, the recognizable Eiwaz rune at the center of them. The book never reaches whatever page it was searching for-- she snaps it shut, then shoves the glowing runes into the floor at her feet.

    A circle expands outward, lined with the sickly green of the Death Rune interwoven with Algiz- Protection -and Kaunaz- Fire. Swiftly, the dark patch cast by her shadow deepens into an inscrutible void and expands, consuming the entirety of the runic circle rotating around her feet.

    Arms clad in rusted white-painted armor emerge, grasping on to the solid ground outside the circle, hauling outward. Some half-dozen soldiers in what must at one point have been sleek space armor haul themselves out, now seared with black marks from energy weapon fire, marred by rust. One's chestplate is split in two, several of them sport several holes. Each gap in the armor extrudes a faintly glowing green crystal. Behind their visors, the skull is faintly visible, green light glowing in empty sockets. Mercifully, in the right lighting, the visor conceals this grisley truth.

    Each and every one is unarmed, save a backpack unit that unfurls and extends over their shoulders once they've fully emerged, exposing mounted rocket launchers. The Witch twirls her fingers, sucking in the void and then the runecircle around her feet, "Secure a perimeter. Blend in as best you can. I'm expecting company, you're the welcoming committee."

    Crackling and inhuman, the trooper's voice is distinctly artificial, a text-to-speech voice emitting from a speaker on the left side of his chestplate, -- IS IT TIME? --

    "Not yet. Give it a minute."

    Only then does the cohort move out into the snow, their white armor rapidly blurring out their outlines against the snow and ice.
Cantio The current situation could be going a lot better than it is at the moment. It could be worse, sure, but it could be a lot better. On one hand, Cantio doesn't have to worry about the sniper for now so long as she's broken line of sight, and she's even getting close enough to where NAZCA 1 and Ishirou are that she can hear the former announcing his intent. On the other hand, there's a fight sure to be brewing at the rate things are going, and she's pretty sure the stranger in the bunker is already prepared for an ambush. Coming from behind him in the classic ambush position, then, would probably be the most dangerous way to approach.

Instead, Cantio starts leaving pieces of her sword around different corners as she approaches the room they're in. She finally makes her move right about when Ishirou's started his own approach on NAZCA 1. Rather than coming at him from behind or around a convenient corner with her sword pieces, however, she comes at him from below. Armored hands (or covered hands, anyway, considering how thin her basic transformation's armor appears) come up from the ground as she goes for NAZCA 1's legs, grabbing on with inhuman strength to test her might against his and, more importantly, draw his attention down towards herself as she starts rising from the ground. It's a risky maneuver for herself, considering how (relatively) slowly she's coming out of the ground, and her sword isn't even anywhere in sight.

"I'd ask you to explain yourself, but that'd be a waste of effort, wouldn't it?"

It's only a moment after she makes her presence clear that the pieces of her sword finally come out from so many different directions at once, glinting faintly as they start firing a dizzying array of lasers at NAZCA 1. They're coming in from all directions at different angles, too, some aimed at center mass while others are pointed sideways to anticipate potential evasive maneuvers, and yet more are even aimed as if trying to carve into and through limbs through their sheer volume.
Tamamo     The ghost answers Tamamo with. "The Hunter." Which would be Orion.

    
Tamamo says, as if to herself, "The Archer to the Hunter... a distance of some eight hours to the west."

    Ishirou says, "They're after her and you."
    Lilian Rook says, "What did you tell them?!"
    Ishirou says, "That you were here."

    Petra Soroka says, "That's stupid, we shouldn't be here to kill anyone. As long as we can help it."

    "Of course, that is so," Tamamo says. Speaking solely of the Archer's lightkeepers, her words are honest.

    "Why would they suddenly be after you?"

    "I can imagine a reason, not far from that which we already know. If this is so... no, even if my guesswork is far from the mark, then it follows that they should treat Lilian as a valuable captive, and all others as obstacles. Such is the result of rationally weighing many lives against few."

    Unfortunately, Tamamo doesn't yet have all the info that Ishirou has from listening to the NAZCA operative speak. If Arthur gets some good info, that would help out, too. Any time she spends gathering information on her own is time she doesn't have to act on it, but she still does the minimum, reading a short distance into the future of each other person here -- Trudy's, Petra's, Arthur's, Cantio (Thief)'s -- to find the routes that imminent violence will take.

    A new set of talismans are pulled from her fuzzy coat's pockets, and Tamamo moves to the door out to toss and direct the landing of the paper strips where her reading tells her the traps will be needed. Baffling charms, arcane shields, redirecting explosions of wind and flame, sapping curses that absorb energy passing through their space -- she's working more quickly than carefully, depleting more of her stashed resources than would normally be called for, justified by not knowing just what will prove to be necessary.

    Tamamo neglects to read her own future.
Rita Ma "this place isn't safe for you"
     Rita, for a fraction of a second, begins to look woundedly indignant.
"I know you're strong, but you're a hero, not a soldier."
     Then she looks embarrassed, dejected. After bracing herself against the chill of the outdoors, her eyes fall to the snow. "I'm really not that, either, Ms. Arina."

     "But... you're not a soldier, either! You're an Immune, aren't you? And that means you don't have to do this. They can't make you. And the way you all sounded in that meeting room, nooding along all sad and droopy..."

     "It sounds like it's something you don't want to do, either. So please talk to me, Ms. Arina."

     Rita crosses her arms and bundles up, which has the side effect of making her look even smaller and rounder than her winterwear previously did. She still can't quite bear to make eye contact. "I don't know what you're sacrificing, here, that's made you so sad. And I don't know what's so important that you're willing to sacrifice it anyway."

     "But I feel like... I have to help you find a way through, that isn't this painful. Please let me help."
James Bond      Bond's withdrawal from goat-shoveling duty is clean. "I have a bad feeling about something," he says simply. "A kind of prickling at the back of my neck, you know? All of a sudden. I'm not Enlightened, but my grandmother knew a few things." Reaching under his uniform, he pulls out a small, blue-and-white circular amulet--the kind that people call nazar, something commonly believed in many parts of the old world to ward against the evil eye. "She passed this down to my father, and my father to me. It's probably nothing, probably something I'll catch hell for... but I need to put my mind to rest. I'll be back."

     The pace of his feet is utterly at odds with the pace of his mind. Once he's out of earshot of his new friend, Bond sends out a message to the GDF, over their local radio frequency. "Foreign actors confirmed on-base, repeat, foreign actors confirmed on-base." If this is going to be a circus, it might as well be three-ring. His leisurely stroll is a good disguise, keeping him from suspicion by either NAZCA or the GDF, a grunt making a casual strut through the snow towards the central command center. "Visual confirmation on at least two hostiles, suspect more. Location coordinates to follow." His thumb mashes out Morse with the location indicated earlier by Ishirou.

     He changes tack, once the alarms are no doubt blaring, hustling towards the airfield, where he'll survey the ground-air support options available and hopefully flush out that sniper Ishirou mentioned with bombardment from one of those unusual, cutting-edge craft they'd seen on a previous op.
Lilian Rook     "Men have killed for much less than the fate of the world." Ai-Mökö says to Petra, unimpressed. He cannot hear the other side of her radio exchange, though, and says "Inviting the army men up the mountains will only bring us all greater troubles. You mean to suffocate a fire by starting an inferno."

    Lilian, by contrast, curses loudly and colourfully at Ishirou's report. "What the fuck did you do?!" she screams, pacing frenetically towards the door. "Because everyone is." she spits at Petra. "Now you want a reason for it?" She briefly presses her hands to her face and breathes through her fingers when Tamamo follows up. "I wish you were wrong, but you're probably not. Just one more fucking thing to add to the list of what went wrong the moment I was born." She lowers her hands away from her face. "Tamamo, please stay behind the others." says Lilian, all the anger in her voice shutting off like a tap, turned cold as the mountain instead. "Lowell, get everyone to Ishirou's position; he has about thirty seconds to live. Soroka, get back behind the gun and link targeting. Grimm, buy them every second you can."

    Arthur experiences a moment of vertigo beyond vertigo. A sense of weightlessness that extends to the binding energy holding his atoms together. The sensation of being about to dissolve into the cosmos and all his thoughts turn to stardust. In that moment, he suddenly and instantly becomes hyperaware of several specific stars in the sky, and knows deep in his gut that each is hovering directly over one of his foes. One next to Ishirou on the backside of the same mountain, and one who'd already fired two more mountains away. In addition, he detects two others at similar distance, forming a deadly triangle around the outpost, and two more in the valley below, swiftly moving up. Three more were far to the north a moment ago, but are rapidly closing in a straight line; fast enough he'd normally have assumed they had an aircraft.

    Tamamo's reading isn't charitable. Arthur is begging to be picked off from miles away in practically every eventuality. Petra is going to be a target for the northern group the moment she reveals her position, apparently having the heavier weapons. Cantio 2 is liable to be pincered by the two moving up from the bottom plus Ishirou's attacker, and the three from the north pincering in. Laying traps down two sides of the mountain is advisable, but unless she can get to Ishirou fast, she can't cut the closeby team off before everyone is already in extreme danger.
Lilian Rook     Ishirou has a nice idea, but lacks experience being held at gunpoint. It's too easy for him to underestimate just how little his assailant has to do, and even his scans aren't quite able to tell him the exact speed at which he can do it.

    Ishirou used the VRCS again, lifting snow into the air. NAZCA 1 reacts in fifteen milliseconds and pulls the trigger in twenty. The distance is barely ten feet between them after Ishirou had already been knifed in the neck. Up close, he hears the crack-hiss of the weapon, sees the slide flick back and forth to release violet steam and heat shimmer, and is immediately struck by linear lightning; cold radiance that hungrily devours his armour and flays molecules apart by their bonds. Not just once either. NAZCA 1 fires no less than six times before the snow collapses far enough to matter, tracking Ishirou far too well with thermal vision and computer assist; he can sense the powered armour booting up in half a second.

    Through the RESCUE unit, it still feels like being shot six times with a heavy magnum revolver. Certainly for the best that Cantio pops up just then. Her hands lock around NAZCA 1's ankles. The sniper fires on her in an instant, lined up for a headshot. Lilian appears without so much as a puff of snow, intercepting the beam on her sword whereupon it shatters into lethal streamers. Then a second sniper; one that Arthur had just detected, apparently on overwatch, shoots at her from the south. A moment after, NAZCA 1 sees her sword bits approaching, he reaches into his winter jacket, and spikes something down into the snow like a football. A bubble of glittering blackness washes over the two of them, expanding into a small hemisphere that both shuts out the laser blasts from outside like a forcefield, and leaves the two in the dark. NAZCA 1 can see in the dark, and assaults her with the vibro knife in a heartbeat.

    The treeline rustles below, and two more white shapes come streaking out of the brush, approaching the melee with rifles up and violet sparks at their backs. The two of them are firing as they move, theoretically a form of advancing suppression, except it's far too accurate. Most is directed up at Trudy's rapidly approaching troops, but some shots are immediately dangerous to Ishirou as he ends up in the crossfire of two automatic energy guns.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Get everyone to Ishirou's position

    "Done. Fuck." Arthur wavers a little, wobbling back and forth as he shakes his head to clear it. Ishirou flicks him the coordinates and he gets the Gate cooking *fast*. Fast enough that he's willing to allow arcs of energy to surge into the surrounding building. He's even more of a beacon now, but hopefully this is solved before he nearly dies again. There's a gate up inside of two seconds, shuddering and crackling with unregulated power. But it's precise, and it'll take anyone who touches it straight to Ishirou.

>Arthur: And get that data to Petra, and anyone else!

    Then, he's got that interface out again. The Gameboy Advance, from before... He's feeding firing solutions to Petra, on a network Tamamo is free to access if she has her own divine smiting solutions. Everything that either one needs to slam some of their opposition, with whatever rounds or acts of god that they can get loaded, that respect each of their respective views on the sanctity of life.

    And then he's heading to Ishirou through the gate, a short while after Trudy's vanguard. He *can't* afford to be taking a lot of heavy shots, he's still on lowered health from going down earlier. What can he do next...
Lilian Rook     "You are to me." Arina rebutts Rita. She doesn't sound like she's about to accept an argument. "You fight monsters. You care about people. You want to help. You want to do good. Be good. So the army isn't a place for you. War isn't like that, even if they won't call it by its name." she says, then looks uncomfortable when Rita turns it around on her.

    "I'm trying to be . . ." says Arina, forlornly. She shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other, staring past Rita rather than meeting her eyes, then laughs nervously. "You wouldn't believe me if I said it was about my homeland, right? Then I wouldn't have tried to be someone whose homeland is 'Earth'." The way she says it sounds as if she might be reciting some sort of motto or training phrase. "But I do know my home. I've lived in Siberia a long time, remember? So I know . . . when people I care about just show up. I know that you have something to do in this country. And that means Lil-- Commander Rook does. And it means it's something she wouldn't-- that she can't tell me. And the only thing that important is . . ."

    She shakes her head slowly. "They might be strangers to you, but these are skilled people. People who care about their homeland a lot more than I do. They're serious about this. They've been serious for years. And there are so many! Please, Rita. You might not trust them, but we can do this. She doesn't have to do everything herself. You don't have to do everything yourself. For once, I'd like it if we did something right on our own. I want to finish this before you all get in trouble, so that maybe you can feel like there are people in this world you can rely on."
Tamamo     Tamamo had already started dropping traps down multiple approach vectors before Lilian said anything, and she only reluctantly backs up when asked in that serious tone, and only because it's Lilian who asked. She hardly has a chance to say, "I would prefer if you stayed safely behind, considering..." before Lilian reaches the point of needing to be somewhere else, stopping Cantio (prime) from being killed.

    Trudy wisely suggests sending in the undead first, and Tamamo shuffles the papers in her hands, pulling what's still a thick stack despite being a quarter of the original. She passes these to the nearest of the space soldiers, saying, "Share these, if you would. Plant pairs of them before you or to your sides, to shield yourself from the sniper's fire." It's a hasty method of setting up a defensive array, and one that takes no advantage of geometry, but baffling even one or three strikes should be enough to give them a decisive advantage, especially if the opposing side has no way of knowing the specific limits of Tamamo's magic. These will burn out quickly, but while they last, they'll distort space, similar to the bounded spaces she creates with more effort, redirecting aim and effort well above or around any hiding behind the walls.

    Maybe Petra's mecha will be okay... though probably not. Tamamo isn't sure how to help with that, but she does have something, driven by her mounting worries, to help Arthur. One, single talisman appears in her hand after reaching between the coat's buttons. Tamamo steps over to take Arthur's hand, and press it to his palm. The design, if it can be interpreted, resembles a sunburst over a burning forest, its lowest layer of small shoots.

    "Keep this, for now."

    It will activate just once, to provide him a momentary but massive recharge and healing from catastrophic injury. If she can't avoid him being shot, again, and she can't raise the dead, then this might work, instead. Maybe. It's only unfortunate that immortality isn't hers to give. Not of a kind that's useful to this sort of situation.
Ishirou Ishirou tries, but he's outmatched by the man who just had him at knifepoint a second ago.  He likely knows this too.  He's not a front-line combatant, he supports even if he tries to think differently.  The shots repeatedly hit the R.E.S.C.U.E. Unit, only saved by the armor that protects his vitals as he' falls flat underneath the snow that he dragged down.  Despite this, those shots /hurt/, reverbing throughout his fleshy body.  For a moment, he wishes he still had the metal body.  

Burrowing systems kick on, and he burrows down avoiding the automatic energy guns.  Immediately he brings up sensors and tries to coordinate the TacNet, trying to update positions.  Hacking these people is likely going to be very hard and would waste time.  The time they don't have...

He gets an idea while burrowing he moves to start deploying mines underneath the paths of the troops.  This is signaled through the tacnet where NOT to stand, and for Petra (or anyone else with high weird weaponry) to shoot these locations for bigger explosions!
Petra Soroka     "GAMING."

    "Y-yeah, I can see that." Petra watches with not-so-subtle amazement, then winces at the reminder of Arthur's recent explosion.

    "Her name doesn't quite carry the weight I think he was hoping it would."

    "First time for everything, huh?" Her warm layers muffle her voice and obscure her rolling eyes, but the scorn comes through loud and clear. Petra shudders at Trudy's minions, giving them as wide a berth as she possibly can within the tower.

>Arthur: And get that data to Petra, and anyone else!

    Petra begins panicking at the imminent threat of battle as the others start making battle plans. Her eyes dart across the room and she fidgets in place, happening to meet Arthur's eyes right as he's sending coordinates to her. "O-oh! Yeah. Yes. I'll get in the Kana, it should be able to fire at that long range." She glances towards where Lilian was for affirmation, but she's already gone.

    While hurrying out of the lighthouse, Petra hesitates briefly next to Tamamo, anxiety pouring off of her in waves. No defensive charm is incoming, though, so with an awkward stuttering start, she runs out the door, climbing into the Kana.

    Petra stumbles into the cockpit, pulling off her scarf and gloves in the abrupt temperature change, then falls into her seat, leg bouncing rapidly. Arthur's coordinates appear on her screen as a cartoonish 2D slice of the surrounding terrain, the Kana represented by a small pixellated icon, and the NAZCA operatives as flashing red angry faces. The screen also shows the degrees to calibrate her cannon to in order to hit each enemy, and Petra sighs in relief at this. She hasn't actually used the Kana as artillery, before.

    The interface also demands that she launch something called a "Pineapple", but she has no idea what that means.
Cantio A shot rings out, but Cantio doesn't see the impact. She hears it, and she sees Lilian appearing nearby within the same second. Arthur identifies the location of a second sniper, and that gives Cantio just enough time to finish pulling herself out of the ground fully and just narrowly avoid getting a beam put through her own head (although she does get some residual burns from it grazing her face).

What's more troubling, though, is that bubble of blackness that washes over them and keeps her lasers from coming in. "Anti-beam tech and sight removal... That's amazing! I'll need to take that later, thank you very much." She comments as a free action, although she doesn't sound particularly thankful at all. Rather, she sounds annoyed, especially when NAZCA 1 pulls that knife on her where she can barely see it coming after going from white snow to pitch blackness.

If she was treating this as a swordfight or even a proper match, Cantio would surely have her ass handed to her already with her (comparably) middling techniques. She's long since learned not to try pulling that stunt, however, and she's still fully aware that there's a second sniper capable of blasting her if she spends too long trying to subdue NAZCA 1. Instead of trying to parry that knife ineffectively with a large sword (especially as it's still in pieces thanks to that laser blasting attempt), she instead gambles on a riskier maneuver: Using an armored forearm to shield herself from NAZCA 1's knife, slamming it forward to restrict how much momentum NAZCA 1 can put into each swing and stab.

Her other arm, meanwhile, goes towards where she guesses NAZCA 1 is based on how she's getting cut and stabbed, aiming to take hold of him once again. She's not an unarmed technician by any means, but she doesn't need to be as long as she can confirm where he is and get a hold of him even for a second. Worst case scenario, she's not even concerned if NAZCA 1 ends up grabbing her instead, as it's all part of a greater maneuver: To keep NAZCA 1's attention on her body and off anything else that might be going on away from her body. Rather than firing more ineffectual lasers, her sword bits instead become not unlike a remote-controlled blender following her movements towards NAZCA 1, somehow managing to avoid cutting into their own wielder and relying on what she can feel, hear, and (barely) see.


Thief Cantio, compared to the real one, has it easier in comparison. Sure, there's plenty of attackers coming up towards the outpost, but there's also plenty of other allies to bounce off of and provide combat support to, especially with Tamamo pointing out the likely future for everyone ahead of time. Unlike the real Cantio, this one's armed with a pair of swords, although they're being used in largely the same way (firing shitloads of lasers) to provide covering fire for those heading away from the outpost via Arthur's gate before heading on through herself.
Rita Ma      Arina firmly shuts Rita down. She doesn't seem ready to believe that she's a 'hero' to anyone, but her melancholy at least becomes tinged with a little more embarrassment.

     "Do what, even?" Rita says uncomfortably. She shuffles her sleeves down over her hands, to keep them warm. Her gaze lingers on the snow. "I know you're after Ms. Oreshnika, too. And I know the army is geared up to fight people, not just monsters, right? So I don't understand at all. They're going to hurt the people Ms. Oreshnika lives with, aren't they?"

     "I trust you, Ms. Arina, but... do you think that wouldn't make Ms. Rook sad?"

     Then she startles, touching her finger to her earpiece. Her eyes widen. Rummaging in her bag, she pulls out her cell phone with a tactical map, kindly provided by the efforts of her teammates.

     "Ms. Arina," she says, suddenly able to meet her friend's eyes. "I think my friends are in trouble. Including Ms. Rook. They're being attacked by some people who came to sabotage you, too- NAZCA, from America. You have really long-range magic, don't you? Do you think you could help them, please?"
Trudy Grimm Trudy Grimm says, "Change of plans, boys!" Trudy calls out into the snowy wilderness.

    The cohort of armor-suited troopers have come under fire sooner than expected, ducking into cover behind trees and stone. Bullets that strike them don't-- especially stop them. In at least one case, the shot goes right through the chest and out the other side. Intuitively that would be an immediate kill or at least a sucking chest wound. Unnerving that the soldier is still moving, for those unfamiliar with Trudy's necromancy and the apparent still-alive-ness of these soldiers in the grim lighting of the mountainside.

    One by one, the soldiers who stayed behind are granted talismans from the bunrei. Convening silently amidst themselves, they eventually start sticking the charms onto their armor, on the side under the arm or the like. The cohort is then warped out by Arthur.

    Quite suddenly, half a dozen heavily armored space soldiers erupt out of the gap between dimensions courtesy of the Mage of Space, right in the vicinity of the NAZCA trooper menacing Ishirou. The first one to emerge is also front and center, his helmet bearing a gold stripe up the center and into the back. Lurching forward, he thrusts his arms out to either side, unleashing a hideous, voiceless, definitely inhuman screech.

    The speaker in his chestplate crackles to life, translating his words as his comrades appear around him. That scream becomes three simple, terrifying words: -- IT'S BONING TIME. --

    The lead trooper's shoulder weapons light up, launching a pair of rockets that track NAZCA-1 through his own body heat. He then lurches forward, his comrades scattering out and moving to surround the man. On his thermal sensors, each one reads as cold as their surroundings-- being dead, and all, only the power sources on their backpacks emit any appreciable heat.

--

    "They appreciate it," Trudy explains for Tamamo's benefit, "They're just... Limited in vocabulary," it comes with an apologetic shrug. Though the Text-to-Speech vocabulary of the space troopers is more than the complete silence of her prior companions, the Knight, the Doctor, and the Soldier.

    She flips open the Grimoire once again, the moment her troopers are transported. Raido is extracted, the rune of the Wheel. She twists this together with Suwalo the Sun Rune just as she disappears through the portal...

    ...such that when Trudy appears behind the wall of screeching skeletons in power armor she summoned, it is in the process of unleashing an orb over her head that bursts in a flash of blinding light."
Lilian Rook     Bond's superstitious attitude is taken in stride. He'd hardly be the first, and he certainly won't be the last, judging by the officer's reaction. "Just don't go flashing that around near this part of the base." he says. "You're more likely to get snickered at than anything, but just in case." The officer shrugs. "Not like I could tell. Or they wouldn't have me standing out here, freezing my ass off!"

    The transmission without source on his end isn't nearly enough to rose a million man operation to flashing red lights and blaring sirens alert, but to an uncommon degree, nobody here is taking any chances. Activity begins hustling around the command complex almost immediately. Alerts go out through cascading chains of officers in pyramidal sequence right after. Guards form up on checkpoints. Boots rush to the airfield. He has just the right timing to show up when several air crews are already gathered around a squadron of VTOL craft, clearing landing pads, booting up engines from cold, flashing warning lights, double checking guns, and doing their diagnostics, before taking off with the aid of dual propellor fans in the wings and a blast of white jet flame from swivelling thrusters below.

    If he bullshits hard, it's possible to get in the seat of a single pilot craft himself, but it'll have to be 'before anyone starts checking really hard', and not after; outrunning his own bad news. The controls are highly similar to what he's useful, if more intuitively placed, and using a touch screen for a large part of them. It's shockingly responsive, and can get off the landing pad in thirty seconds from his climbing into the cockpit. His options appear to be an undermounted autocannon with a wide tracking radius, ATG missiles loaded under the wings, a long rack of fragmenting cluster bombs, and both AP and HE ammunition for the gun. More than enough to be highly dangerous.
Lilian Rook     Thankfully, NAZCA unit does indeed seem incapable of shooting through several meters of obscuring snow and solid Earth to continue to hit Ishirou in drill mode, but after what he's seen so far, it feels like a nerve-wracking matter of time somehow, as if they might suddenly be able to do anything whenever they feel like it.

    The mines are seeded cleanly, but the reinforcements are moving so fast that there's barely time to deploy them. The rumbling thump of one going off behind him, and the flash of fire and explosion of snow and steam visible to everyone else, is enough to tell both him that it worked, and everyone else that he's alive and dropping mines, for good and ill. One of the reinforcing NAZCA operatives is hurled high up into the air, breaking his counter-charge up the mountain, and he crunches back down into another snowdrift moments later.

    Somehow, he recovers from the blast just before hitting the ground. Something whizzes through the air with a sound like an overlarge hornet. A shark crack skips off a nearby rock. Then what must be a grenade explodes right in the middle of Trudy's troops. The actual boom is very small and subdued, and seems to drag on for half a second, more like ripping paper than an explosion. A hundred and some miniscule smart projectiles rip through their ranks in a slightly airborne spiral. It's a great mercy that their undead nature means they aren't immediately slaughtered by lots of little holes put in them from darts swerving around their cover, but some of them are bound to strike ammo.

    NAZCA 1 is clearly not fucking around. He dives on Cantio with a total lack of hesitation. Trading her arm for a clean blow back is an option, but it means feeling the knife bury up to the bone in her arm, screaming with heat and shearing force, excruciatingly painful and normally fatal within seconds for someone with major arteries in their limbs. Missiles from Trudy's small army repeatedly pound against the bubble, causing it to shudder, turn gradually see-through, and then burst, allowing her sword bits to counterattack. The man's jacket is torn to shreds, dropping spare ammo in the snow. Sparks fly from the powered armour beneath. Something electrical blows up. He throws himself down on top of her, pinning her under his weight and trying to twist the knife in her arm to lock it behind her, while hitting something on his belt with a free hand. A second later, the tacnet goes fuzzy as an electronic pulse washes over the area, instantly scrambling all digital uplinks, which he takes to be the source of control for the bits.

    Unfortunately this doesn't impede their coordination in the slightest. The eerie silence with which they operate no doubt is owed to that telepathic communication. Petra is just on the edge of it, seeing several of the icons on her interface crackle and blip around. Meanwhile, the triangle of sniper coverage detected earlier by Arthur is of immediate, deadly concern. Not only are they liable to pick off Trudy's troops, but the three angles by which more lethal beams repeatedly converge in from, singling out individuals like the finger of death, threaten to tag thief Cantio or Arthur and his reinforcements the instant he arrives. It is by the grace of Tamamo's talismans that the group is bought a short while to spot them. Petra, having not yet fired, is left unmenaced, but she can see the three reinforcement dots coming into range very quickly.
Lilian Rook     "I don't know." Arina says to Rita, meanwhile, and she says so without a hint of embarrassment or hesitation. "But I do know that it's important. I've been entrusted with enough to feel the shape of it, and I know people are really depending on me for something that matters. It's different than the feuds and grudges I already know, Rita. And if you're here, I'm right. It must matter, a lot." she insists.

    She slowly tilts her head to one side at the name. "I'm sorry, Rita. But I think you know a little more than me already. Commander Rook didn't tell me anything about that person. But if she's not a bad person, then I really don't think she'd get hurt. I know that this seems really scary, but it's not the same as the type of army you're used to. It hasn't been for decades. Unless they're the enemy, all humans are allies in this. Aren't we? All these people are here to make this country safer; why not for your new friends too?"

    However, she does let on, with the squaring of her shoulders and the twitch of her jaw, that she recognizes either NAZCA or was braced to hear America. "That's right . . ." she whispers under her breath, not for Rita, then straightens up and brings her gaze back, only to obscure it by pulling her mask down over her face like always. "We're right next to the Idol. I can help. Do you have a way of getting there? I can send you away, if you need to go."
Ishirou The pulse takes down the tacnet, even though there is a magical part of it, it /IS/ magiteck.  What hurts one hurts the other, though not entirely.  He does still have his scanning, he does still have his analysis.  He's not blind, but he needs to consider his moves.  If they're going to try and shut off their advantages, without the reverse happening...

He runs every analysis he can on Nazca 1, trying to find weaknesses in his armor as well as the mental network they're sharing.  There has to be a reason why they used radio...but what was it?

Regardless, even if there wasn't a reason, he will get that data and immediately send it to both Lilian and Cantio who are engaged with him.  Just a readout through magical means of where his weaknesses are, and where to strike to maximize their damage.  

Ishirou does not stay still underground, continuing to move, and his drills continue to soften the earth.  There is a long-term plan here too.
Lilian Rook     Out on the mountainside, Lilian vacates a stretch of snow that is converted into a cloud of vapour and a pool of glassed rock but a moment later. The rapidfire clash of what sounds like glass on metal downslope is enough to know she's engaged the operative who hadn't stepped on a mine, powerless to prevent her from melee combat. He ends up rolling back from his covered position, tumbling down the slope and back into the forest, his powered armour covered in gaping wounds, and throws away his rifle to draw his knife just as Lilian flashes forward to pursue.

    Arthur has precious little time. Once he's there, he won't be getting back so easily. A silent, telepathic command goes out, and NAZCA 1 and the two on the ground emit enormous amounts of spatial interference, detectable to him intuitively, and registering to Tamamo as a distortion of sacred geometry. Arthur can recognize it as being similar to an Urban Center's teleportation wards, but both much smaller and vastly more powerful, operating on principles that don't seem to involve magic at all, but rather the subtle compression and stretch of spacetime.

    This would be a masterful step two tactic, if Lilian were actually a teleporter as their intel suggests. As of now, however, it's little more than a thunderdome to prevent the retreat of wounded Elites or the mass arrival of G.D.F troops.

    With the whine of rotors and the roar of jet engines starting to become audible, as aircraft (running dark, electromagnetically camouflaged with no lights) invisibly close in from the FOB below, it's starting to get more difficult to hear quiet, stealthy sounds. It's odd, then, that everyone would 'hear' something they barely even consciously register. The faintest of faint echoes of echoes of an echo from far far oh so very far away, as if someone's voice had carried from the moon. It rings in their ears, slightly, like tinnitus, and makes the wobbling shapes of words with something-sounds that not only don't seem to translate, but don't seem to have a pitch or weight or resonance of any kind, impossible to even identify as voice, but merely speech.

    Except for Arthur. Because it makes sense to him. He knows the sound of someone speaking to the greater cosmos, without ears to listen to crude human throat noises. From many many many miles afar, he hears a tiny, soft voice, asking the constellation above.

O gleaming stars of the night sky, wise watchers of all men
Unblinded by the light of the day, pray tell me of where and when
Whence now does the devil lie? Is he known to thee and I?
If he should not pass me by, then heaven fall and let him die.
James Bond      Part of being an infiltrator is knowing when to take decisive action. Sometimes, one has the luxury of waiting--and often, one does not. This is an example of the second situation, but even when one's hand is forced, there is still a certain degree of leverage from being an unknown unknown. Bond is adept at using that leverage--which is to say that when the chips are down, he's very good at bullshit.

     With the timing down, he's among the boots rushing to the airfield, falling in as naturally as he breathes. From body language (tense, on alert) to expression (attentive, grim) he's got all the right signs of a pilot called on short notice for direly important work. He splits off from the crowd and finds one of the aforementioned single-pilot crafts, keeping enough hustle to stay ahead of inquisitive double-checking without moving so quickly as to arouse suspicion. The idea is to look like a pilot, not a thief, after all.

     His entry into the craft is a well-practiced dance, each step occurring within seconds of the last. His finger taps an indicator on the touchscreen reading HOOK/STOVL, causing the VTOL systems to position themselves. Another tap, on HOVER, causes the engines to invert, and the craft emits a gradually higher whine. Pulling back on the stick brings it into the air, where he coaxes it away from the airfield before the landing gear retracts. Tapping HOVER twice more and returning the engine to its original position, Bond takes off for the position Ishirou had indicated the sniper.

     "Triggering squawk ident. Visual confirmation of hostiles on ground; bandits three zero two four. Climbing and maintaining angels six."

<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Petra, or anyone with high yeild weaponry, I deployed mines in these locations, shoot here when they get close to really give them some fire power."

     Bond switches radio channels, as snowy white expanse races below and the dark night sky yawns infinitely above. "Copy. I'll come back around after the snipers. Soroka, careful you don't shoot through me."

     Before he can assist in clearing out the advancing personnel, though, he needs to weed out the snipers. First, the one he knows about--the one on the mountain. Trying to ID him in all this is pointless. Bond's finger taps on the cluster bombs, watching the readouts on the screen and the range indicators on his HUD for the right time. The bombs are dropped with the press of another button. Anticipating a reprisal, Bond activates the autocannon next, eyes flicking down to the screen for any tracking indicators.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Deal with the sniper

    No!! Arthur has to trust Bond, who called out that the sniper was going to be taken care of. Getting in the way of that would be unwise! He can, at bare minimum, swing an arm out and instantly summon a series of highly complex warped geometries in a kind of donut surrounding the engagement, turning the space between the Ishirou encounter and the snipers into a confusing visual funhouse mirror that will require at least a few seconds of readjustment.

    That is all he can do before the wards get him. Arthur's hands burst with black energy, gravity and geometry being defied in his palms. "GHHHHRRRRK!" He stumbles, fingers convulsing as his arms briefly go limp. "FUCKHEAD." He grunts in pain. Alright. Trust Bond to deal with *that*, but focus on this encounter with the NAZCA team in close quarters. At least one direction will be safe at all times.

    But it's unwise, that for a moment, he freezes. Only the most attentive ears would hear him recite the question as he hears it. The message is sent. Now to live to hear the reply. NAZCA 1 would be unwise to engage. But the two with their automatic rifles and their interference, those don't have coverage.

>Arthur: Defend the First Bloom

    This is, actually, the first time Arthur has encountered a specific, highly concetrated effort to threaten Lilian Rook specifically, done with awareness of what they're doing. He gets the understanding that they're dealing with the Blooms on a same-or-better level of knowledge about the tree, the blooms, and the other abstract ideas. This, in a sense, is no longer the indifferent, apathetic cruelty of the world, but rather, the first time Arthur has seen a tangible manifestation of the world's direct malice towards her.

>Arthur: Finally. Something Tangible.

    Arthur pulls the ripcord on his broom and screams.
Trudy Grimm     A grenade is fired into the middle of the formation of Space Revenants. The centermost one, the leader with the gold stripe, intercepts it. The projectile punches through his faceplate in a shower of plasteel and bone shards, prompting him to stagger-- but remain standing. The grenade audibly rattles down through the metallic interior of his armor, lodging somewhere in the chest as it swells up into an explosion.

    Metal shards erupt from his armor but do not escape it; lodging in the plates, transforming the skeletal soldier into a porcupine of metallic spines. Following the *whump* of the blast, and the shriek of metal restraining metal, the revenant collapses in the snow with the clatter of dry bones.

    The soldier beside him collects the corpse, the backpack unit already sparking and sizzling. Wielding the carcass by the arm, the space revenant brings the body down on NAZCA-1 in an overhead swing. Recovering from the backswing becomes a followup, sideways, upward swipe that impacts directly using the sizzling backpack-- which explodes on impact in an effort to dislodge him from Cantio.

    With lasers zeroing in on others in the cohort of screaming, armored undead, the space revenants swing their attentions outward. Each one that's targeted fires missiles at an origin point that isn't targetting them-- because it'd be rather foolish to fire missiles directly into a laser beam. It's somewhat sacrificial, kept alive longer than expected thanks to Tamamo's shielding wards, but creatures are soon destroyed in the onslaught-- with half a dozen homing rockets sailing at each sniper's position.

    Trudy, to her effort, lets out a sigh. From the Grimoire she extracts the rune of Flame, Wunjo. As she twists this rune into its corrupt form, she draws in Mannaz, the rune of Man, and pushes both down into the runic circle at her feet, invoking the Curse of Immolation.

    Should the curse take hold, NAZCA-1's body begins heating up. True agony for someone with metal and electronics lodged deep within his flesh now attempting to reach its melting point.
Lilian Rook     As far as Ishirou can tell, the conclusion dawning quickly on him is that NAZCA 1 had only used his radio for the express purpose of Ishirou hearing him. He'd been mindgaming him from the moment his first sneak attack didn't secure the kill. The suits they're all wearing are frighteningly robust too; the visor is by necessity the least durable place, as a faceplate and camera were apparently deemed too big of a point of failure, but they'll know to defend their heads, as any trained fighter would. He can also identify the places they're keeping reactive explosives on them. They're very small targets, and prone to moving erratically with the owner, but an energy blast to one of them could cook them off.

    His seismic sensors detect the previously mined NAZCA commando running overhead; his reduced speed betrays damage, but it's fast enough to catch up to Ishirou drilling. His drill bit shortly bangs against a spherical wall of inky night, just like the one that had blocked cantio. The spherical forcefield projects underground too, trapping him. Next comes the faint vibration of something whirring and churning through the snow and dirt. A drone, autonomous, no uplinks, no wireless, boring and worming through the fractures his drilling has created to try and latch onto his drilltank mode, and then detonate the earthworm chain of plastic explosives carried within it. Or, should it be crushed or shot beforehand. The blast will get him down here, but not go through the ground above far enough to hurt the user now. The fact that they have bomb-bots hints at a certain level of preparedness for assassination.

    Bond gets into point position, and arrives first. The wash of electronic counter-noise instantly scrambles his instruments, leaving him flying analogue, but credit to the G.D.F's R&D where it is due, there are mechanical switches for everything he could need as well. The whine behind the rotors sputters out, and a backup engine fires up, burning through a small supply of emergency fuel to keep them going. Missile targeting is impossible, but dropping bombs over the sniper perch doesn't care. Banking away, he can see repeated flashes of strobing violet light turn away from the battlefield and to the bomblets in the air, rapidly sniping out the submunitions he must have already calculated would hit him with pinpoint accuracy, leaving the rest to blanket the area in a carpet of explosions that begins a minor avalanche.

    He picks up the sniper abandoning concealment and moving at ridiculous speed down the mountain, leaping fifty feet down and sliding on his side as much as he runs, staying well ahead of the wave of snow. He somehow finds the time to fire on the VTOL while he parkours his ass down a mountain, striking Bond's craft twice, once just shy of the fuel tank, and another scoring the side of the canopy, not quite as accurate as before.

    Turning the autocannon on him is thus, very easy. Bond's pushing of the stick trigger is gratified by the entire cockpit vibrating, and the muffled sound of a flywheel screaming behind and under his chair. Blue-white tracers pour from craft into his field of vision, with such rapidity that he can simply walk the stream of fire over his target like a laser beam.
Cantio If Cantio had to worry about Ishirou getting chased down and kidnapped, she'd have a lot more to worry about with NAZCA 1's weapon being as horrible as it is. It's actually rather exhilarating despite the clear and constant danger to her, especially with the vibroknife causing her no end of bloody screaming pain from getting right into her arm before she can finally fall backwards to try and keep it from digging too deep into her.

Luckily, she doesn't have to worry about her ally/whatever Ishirou counts as these days getting kidnapped, at least by NAZCA 1 specifically. She certainly looks like she's on the back foot, and she's not so heavy that he can't body slam her into the ground for what would surely be a checkmate even against an Elite with inhuman abilities like her own.

Except she still has those same inhuman abilities demonstrated moments ago earlier, and being brought down to the ground doesn't go quite as expected. She certainly falls easily enough, but she doesn't actually stop falling even when NAZCA 1 should feel her hitting the ground. Instead, Cantio continues to sink into and through the ground rather than letting him pin her down and dig that knife in deeper.

Just because she's sunk through the ground doesn't mean her sword bits do, however. Although they're not quite as self-maneuvering as they were before the pulse goes out, she can still manipulate them with magic alone. Within the relative safety of being stuck in the ground, meanwhile, Cantio can actually put all her focus into doing exactly that. The sword bits move as a unit now rather than individually moving pieces, but there's still an excessive number of them diving towards him post-slam, all spinning around right on top of him with both the shearing power of swords and the melting power of lasers.

She chalks up that strange noise in the back of her ear to the sounds of her sword bits spinning and lasering wildly, but something about it bothers her. It's arguably even worse because she can't quite understand it.
Rita Ma      "... all humans are allies in this. Aren't we?"

     Rita smiles a forlorn little smile. "That's right, Ms. Arina."

     "Maybe you're right. The people here have been really kind to me. Even when they shouldn't be," she admits. "But I know Ms. Rook won't be able to believe that at face value. So... isn't it my job to help her investigate, until she can be comfortable trusting in it, too?"

     "Do you have a way of getting there?"

     Rita is about to say 'no', but then catches herself. "Thank you, Ms. Arina. But I think I do have a way. Stay safe, okay?"

     Everyone's arming up, now, so she decides not to exert her invisibility as she jogs towards the balauri pen and hops the fence. Where's that golden-brown one she 'bit' earlier?

     I am your Queen. Obey me.

     She hops onto its back, urges it into the sky- the cage depended on their tameness, right?- and then directs it, while clinging to its scales and trying her best not to look down.

     The tactical map on her cell phone fuzzes and stops updating with the pulse. But it's still a decent reference for the moment. There's three more headed for Petra- can she handle that on her own? ... No, that's the wrong question. She shouldn't have to.

     The three reinforcements, there, coming up the side of the mountain. Attack them for me. ... And bring me a little closer to the ground?
Arthur Lowell     Arthur closes the distance to the treeline they approached from in a rocket-boost so fast and so sudden that his face twists in undignified ways from even the dampened g-forces, making his way for one or both -- it doesn't matter, he'll work with whatever their arrangement or flanking maneuver is. He is faster than the sound he makes on approach.

    "TOUCH HER AND I BREAK THE HAND, BLOOM-CULLING SHITHEAD!" His broom's blender-bristles scream as he goes for heavy slams and slashes that can only be endured through desperate blocks liable to put every bone in one's arm at risk.

    "STEP AT HER AND I BREAK THE KNEES, TREE-LOVING FUCKFACE!!" He can't do complex spatial maneuvers, but he can do a blind, all-area harsh gravity pulse, strong enough to be more like being punched from below with enough force to shatter every joint in the legs.

    "SHE DESERVES BETTER THAN YOU, AND I'M GONNA GIVE IT TO HER!! NOW TELL ME WHERE THAT THIRD BLOOM IS, OR I'LL SMASH YOUR FUCKIN' JAWS INTO DUST!!!"



    Maybe he's a little frustrated about being punked over and over on this operation. But that wouldn't explain the focus and dedication. No, he's far more vicious now having finally found a real, tangible, physical, deliberate, and most importantly, *punchable* manifestation of the abstract cruelties he's only been able to loosely comprehend are part of Lilian's life.
Ishirou Ishirou was now cursing himself out even louder in his head.  He's been on the wrong end of mind games the entire encounter.  He.../he/ was fooled.  He looks stupid.  He's completely embarrassed.

Nazca one has done the worst thing imaginable to Ishirou, making him look stupid in front of a lot of people.  Ishirou is now /very/ upset.  Extremely upset.  The kind of upset that turns a nice, if a sometimes sarcastic guy, into a gremlin of an asshole.  He's now /motivated/ to be as absolutely spiteful as possible.

Lilian has rubbed off on him.

Ishirou runs into the forcefield and is stuck in its grasp.  It only takes him a few moments to realize the drone coming at him.  He's also learned that American tech is about denying information...so hacking is a no-go, but it still has to track him somehow.  What happens now is a bit of radio trickery, running a bit of garbage data so that for a bit Nazca's signal looks like his, and his signal looks like Nazca, and he releases a few mines up to cause an explosion across the shield.

He holds onto the drone with the VCRS.  He just needs to hold onto it for the shield to drop...

Then Ishirou releases it the moment he detects the shield gone.  To, hopefully, have the drone chain the plastic explosives into Nazca one.  
Lilian Rook     Just as Tamamo's wards are battered down, Trudy's surviving troopers begin firing back. Just as with bond, the rockets are picked out of the sky with unerring efficiency, getting nowhere near their targets, but keeping anyone else from being shot, stalling until Arthur warps space himself. The other two snipers give up on providing that withering interdiction completely, to--

    No, they've clearly gotten a message from one of the three men on the ground. The beams are now streaking into the forest, where he must be in combat with Lilian. Both of them are firing quickly enough for anyone to tell that it must be emergency protective fire, and their demonstrated accuracy so far makes it easy to tell exactly where the two must be even without instrumentation. The trees provide no cover at all, simply being cut in half by the exotic weaponry, but the fact they're still shooting means that battle is ongoing.

    NAZCA 1 is so committed to his grapple that he doesn't relent even with Cantio's sword bits battering against his back. He seems to have already calculated that he can finish her before they get him; and NAZCA team does currently outnumber the Elites. He keeps pushing until his combat knife goes through her arm and pins it to her chest, then pulls his gun close into a relock stance, plants his knees on her, presses the muzzle against her chest, and begins rapidly firing those lethal energy blasts without any ostensible limit to his magazine; the slide merely vents heat and exotic steam as it pumps back and forth.

    It's Trudy's curse that saves her, as that finally brings him off her, having to leave the knife still planted in her flesh. Oddly, she doesn't hear a peep from him, or see him stumble in the least. His sense of pain must be suppressed, though he's clearly sensed the damage to his implants and gear will become intolerable before he can kill Cantio and get cover. As he leaps back, maneuvering thrusters burn through his coat and pants around his legs and waist, hurling him far back. He fires a grapnel cable from a wrist, anchors it to a boulder, and swings immediately out of Trudy's field of view with a second burst.

    It's an impressive sleight of hand, that it distracts completely from what he'd thrown into the air, now landing practically on top of her head. A black metal polyhedron breaks apart into a hundred fragments, propelled away from each other at high speed, only to be fixed together in space by nearly invisible strings of light between them, and then her surroundings take on the appearance of cracked and stained glass. Consequently, her runes appear to be slid around into slightly disjointed and mismatched fragments, as if viewed through that broken glass. No, they are broken. The shapes have lost their mystical form. The flow of magic cuts off completely. This can be nothing less than a locally developed solution to a very broad class of magic; the disruption of inherently magical shapes and forms. Runes. Arrays. Trigrams. Chakras. Spell circles.

    Ishirou's bit of trickery pays off. The drone halts, computes the contradictory information, and then shuts down as an ostensible safety feature; probably part of an Antegent-proof paradigm. His mines blast through the forcefield a moment later, though it collapses the dirt and snow over him, sending it sliding down the moutain and leaving him exposed. The NAZCA commando he's left face to face with isn't prepared to shoot him instantly, rocked by the explosion and not having known exactly where he was, but it's only moments before his own, matching device is thrown into Ishirou, attempting to shut down his magic and cripple him as well, before pumping automatic fire into him from close range.
Lilian Rook     Arthur, ploughing into the trees, isn't ignorant to this either. Chasing the beam fire, he comes across the vast swathe of space turned into stained glass by another commando's device; in the first place, they were likely to be used against another Bloom, and are another step of what should be a solid anti-Lilian plan, even if it is going awry now without the desired nine on one odds.

    The commando himself, however, is just about on his last legs when he get there, as once again, they have made the reasonable miscalculation of assuming her ability is powered by magic. He stumbles into the two locked in an exchange of claustrophobic hand to hand blows, with Night Mist halfway lodged in a vibro-knife, and the commando's powered armour is cracked and failing, and his jacket is tattered and stained with blood.

    Lilian blinks away from where two beams should have shot her in the back and side, her armour still fizzling gold where one had hit her recently, and then Arthur's gravity blast hurls her opponent off his feet completely. He is in no shape to resist Arthur's brutal rushdown. The broom crumples his badly compromised armour in a flurry of swipes and grinding slashes. Gear falls out of his coat and scatters into the snow. Arthur can feel the crunch of bone. The polarized visor leaks blood through the new shatter pattern in the front. He crumbles limply in the snow moments later.

    Lilian stares at him in a moment of briefly flustered shock, opens her mouth to say something, and then visibly switches to "Did you hear that? That verse. That was a girl's voice, wasn't it? I don't recognize the words, but--" And then Arthur is promptly shot in the back by one of the two snipers.
Petra Soroka     The silence of the Ekanamsha is, as usual, not a tactical decision. The mech gleams dully in the starlight, squatting on its four legs, cannon aimed skyward, smoothly tracking with minute adjustments as its target, one of the three NAZCA reinforcements, closes in. But still, not firing.

    Petra's hand is trembling with tension, gripping the trigger on the control stick of her cannon rigidly, her finger unable to squeeze or release. She knows it's stupid, feeling this icy panic every time she gets in a fight, and she thought after taking on Hiromi, something like this wouldn't be overwhelming, but....

    The walls of the cockpit feel more cramped than when the party crammed inside for Trudy's teleportation, suffocating her. Options run through Petra's head, cowardly plans; firing the Kana and then abandoning it to fight on foot, or not even firing it at all and claiming that she silenced the cannon to draw less attention. Tamamo said that the Kana would be targeted, not Petra, right?

<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "You have their positions, yes? As time is short, would you mind allowing me inside?"

    This paralysis might have lasted forever if not for Tamamo's interruption. Petra jolts to alertness, opening the hatch with a pneumatic hiss to allow her inside. She tries to look like she'd been busy manipulating measurements and dials before Tamamo came in, rather than in the middle of a panic attack, but her face is sheet-white.

    <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "If you could hold until I have made a small preparation, we may ensure safety from the other snipers."

    Petra nods with maybe too much enthusiasm at this. Being given explicit instructions and having another moment to breathe? That sounds perfect. She's just a girl.
Cantio While all that's happening with the real Cantio, Thief Cantio is still having a bit of a rough time herself. Unlike the real one, she's not quite as ~~important~~ strong, so she's forced to focus far more on evasive maneuvers and using whatever cover she can find. It takes her a little while longer to realize that there's reinforcements coming, too, so that cuts down on potential sources of cover.

What she can provide, however, is more targets. Releasing a swarm of drones of her own, she already knows they won't last nearly as long in battle as the Kana or Tamamo or Arthur would, and certainly not as long as even herself. She doesn't need them to, though, as their numbers and the threat of harm is far more important than what they can actually do.

The drones rise upwards steadily, slowly, spreading out in a wide pattern as faint purple lights gleam in their strange-looking eyes. That light spreads to envelope each one of the odd machines, and they in turn rotate slowly to face the coordinates pointed out earlier, as though they're looking right at the snipers and NAZCA 1's reinforcements. Each one lets out an excessively loud whining noise as the light grows brighter, almost as though they're charging a massive amount of power inside them, ready to burst out and carve through the mountains and everything around them if they're left alone for too long!

In reality, their lasers aren't nearly that powerful, but they certainly have that look to them while they're charging. She just needs to buy enough time for everyone else's gambits to play out.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Did you hear that?

    "Yes." He says, eyes wide, panting heavily from his rushing attack. Wounded, disoriented, stressed, he struggles to get his memories straight. "'O gleaming stars...'" He mutters, in the cadence he had heard...

    Arthur goes down the minute he's shot. Tamamo's talisman is going to kick in and save him, but for a moment, he can't keep track of anything. Dammit, *dammit*, he left his obscuring zone... He loses track of that commando and of Lilian, just for a moment, as he falls face-first on the glass. Realizing something might happen while he's faceplanted, he's almost instantly trying to push onto his feet, long before the talisman has finished returning him to something approximating combat-capable...
Lilian Rook     Arina smiles brilliantly when Rita actually agrees with her. She can see it, just around the corners of her mask, from the right angle. "I'm so glad! I'm so, so glad!" she gushes, only to trail off when Rita continues. Her posture droops for a moment. "I . . . know. The Commander is really amazing. Past incredible. But . . . well, it's not like stories. People don't get that motivated because they're fine, do they? I only have a little bit of an idea, of whatever it is that makes her . . . the way she looks at people who aren't us. But . . . nnnh . . . I know you're right too, Rita."

    And then Arina gathers herself back up, square and straight-backed.

    "Okay. I'll guide you there!" she says, striding right past where the Rita finds the balaur enclosure, and disappearing towards that enormous, tree-and-face obelisk. Rita is already in the air long before anyone will realize that she isn't the correct Enlightened for that mount; their riders are still inside, which she knows for a fact. The beast is obedient to her as it should be, and a powerful flier; enough that she begins slowly gaining on the VTOLs right away.

    For some reason, instead of getting the wind in her face, she feels it at her back; parting from her way and under the monster's wings. It feels, for that time, like the air is a friend of a friend, here to help her because someone asked it pretty please. She speeds up immensely. The pounding of the balaur's wings propels her beyond the fighter craft entirely. She arrives just in time to swoop low and visually see the three white shades taking the rocks twenty feet at a time, almost upon Petra and Tamamo.

    She barely has time to think before the five-headed demon responds to them; it attacks even before she asks, and for the first time, she feels a prickle of genuine hostile intelligence behind its dark eyes and long anglerfish fangs. Roving blasts of hellish fire extend a hundred meters from the monster and crisscross over the squad, easily able to suppress three at a time, melting away ice and melting rock thousands of years old, and spiking the temperature inside the lighthouse by twenty degrees as the shimmering wave of heat rolls out from it.

    As the monster strafes over, lightning smashes down in its wake, pounding the mountainside, and fist-sized chunks of hail shriek down like bullets out of a cloudless sky. A couple of them even dent the Kana's exterior hull layer, sounding terrifying from the inside, though they pose no danger of penetrating. As the balaur peels away, Rita sees the black 'bits' that are now familiar to the others chasing after her. Broken glass reality encroaches from behind. The lethal weather is spontaneously snuffed out. Beam fire concentrates on the creature's belly as the scorched survivors scramble out into the open, causing it to roar and thrash beneath her like an enraged bull.

    But they have no answer to biological abilities. Hellfire turns on them again. And it's a very short drop for Rita.
Ishirou Ishirou is not the one being left holding the bag for once, the explosion reveals him, but the agent wasn't expecting it.  He was expecting him to be destroyed, likely.  It also takes only a fraction of a moment to realize the thing being thrown at him is bad news, and the blown-up rocks are grabbed by the VCRS to try and deflect it away from him.  

This doesn't let him escape the gunfire, which once more he's saved by the armor not being disabled.  He doesn't retreat back into the rock and snow and instead charges the agent.  It might seem desperate, but he has a plan.

Right as Ishirou gets to him, the armor and Ishirou disconnect.  Ishirou slides underneath the agent, trying to use his twink body to get under his legs and flip back to his feet.  POD goes over, flying overhead before coming back down to reconnect and reform the base of the R.E.S.C.U.E. unit.  

The drill system flies in a direct line for his chest, aiming to distract him while Ishirou aimed to get behind him.  Ishirou grabs a pair of blades, with an electromagnetic payload.  The goal was the try and drive them into the cybernetic parts of the soldier, enough to try and disrupt his shielding.  He follows this up by trying to hack into the connection, trying to get into that data connection they all share.

Then proceed to fill it with enough viruses to make a 'free' porn sight blush in envy.
James Bond      Bond had an inkling that there'd be a reprisal. He didn't have a clue that reprisal would come from the sniper, personally. A grunt of surprise punctuates the sound of prematurely exploding bombs below, before flinching from the impact on the canopy.

They'll have sent their best, then.

     A less advanced craft would have to slow down or switch to hover to lead with the autocannon. A small smile comes to his face as he sees just how well this one tracks, even at speed. So have 'we.' Selecting HE rounds borne of a desire to leave nothing to chance, Bond traces the path, and more. Taking advantage of the tracking and leaning on the trigger, he passes over the mountain. As it races beneath him, Bond makes a steep climb, then a vertical flat turn, conserving momentum and speed to reverse his direction. A short dive levels the craft out.

     With the wing-over-wing maneuver done, he's moving in the same direction as the sniper careening down the mountain, and in the midst of the bombardment from the autocannon, looses another salvo of cluster bombs. He hadn't forgotten what happened the last time, however, and doesn't intend to make himself an easy target now that he knows his enemy's capabilities. Sacrificing altitude for speed, Bond coaxes the plane into a turn around the mountain, keeping the nose low and rolling to drop into a more steep, agressive trajectory, the autocannon blasting all the while.

     Every few seconds, Bond's eyes flick across the horizon, in search of more brightly colored exotic weapons fire, hand ready to force the craft into an evasive roll the moment he sees one headed his way. Just because he's tied this one up doesn't mean the others are--especially if they're all as persistent as this sniper.
Tamamo     Tamamo says, at least reaching the area of Centaur-281 despite the pulse, "Ms. Soroka?"
    Petra Soroka says, "Y-yeah?"
    Tamamo says, "You have their positions, yes? As time is short, would you mind allowing me inside?"
    Petra Soroka says, "Inside the Kana?"
    Petra Soroka says, "Yeah, of course."
    Tamamo says, "Thank you."
    Tamamo says, "If you could hold until I have made a small preparation, we may ensure safety from the other snipers."
    Petra Soroka says, "Sounds good, I'll hold for your signal."

    Tamamo does not move particularly quickly, right up until she does. It's all in the leg strength, leaping in a flurry snow to reach the Kana the moment she's outside, not going first for the cockpit entrance (even if it's open) but for the main cannon barrel, making a three-point landing and slapping down a mess of talismans that glow a faint, sunset-red. Tamamo taps down the length, only then makes another leap to get inside, and bustles in. Having three tails is always a bit of an issue in enclosed spaces, and the winter coat doesn't really help reduce the space she takes up, in the event of cramped quarters. It is, at least, soft to bump into. Compressible, even. And though she still looks half a degree from shivering, herself, up here on the mountaintop, her presence in an enclosed space pushes back that wintry chill.

    She pauses, then, locking eyes with the pilot. Her own are shining gold, but what else might dramatically occur by looking into them wouldn't, in Petra's case. Instead, the moment is followed by Tamamo asking, "Are you quite alright? Oh, no, of course not. One could not be, in this circumstance, I suppose. Please pardon my foolish question. And yet, we must do as we must. Those who would seek us harm possess that insanity common to soldiers, that allows them to tolerate the intolerable, and give that advantage over those who cannot."

    She points to the display, showing the information as Arthur had confirmed. There's one position she could already tell was being covered by bomb strikes, and that leaves two. "Here, would you fire first at this position? Do not worry as to whether you might miss. Try, and you will succeed. This is the blessing I will grant you. Next, swiftly strike at this next position. Do not worry as to whether you will tire. Push forward, and you will continue to move. This is the second blessing I will grant you."

    Good fortune and the ability to keep trying, surpassing one's own limits, are the two most common requests answerable by her divine blessings. At the moment, Tamamo's decided not to be stingy with them at all. She won't hold back.

    She hasn't mentioned the curses she's laid over the barrel, to be transferred to the next several pieces ammunition that travel it. Those curses are for the targets, to draw in the living energy of those within range of each impact point. It's unlikely to be survivable, won't be blocked by a mountain of snow, and will wreck arcane protections just as easily.

    It isn't a time to be holding back.
Trudy Grimm     The Witch takes a step back, bracing her position, tracking NAZCA-1 with faintly glowing eyes as he finally evades. Her fingers hook like claws, twisting, ramping up the temperature of the Curse of Immolation like one would while turning up the dial on a stove.

    This escalation promptly stops when the Runes are disrupted. The curse remains as it is even when he flits out of her line of sight, though mercifully is no longer increasing, keeping his implants at redline-- searing flesh but probably survivable. Trudy is, momentarily, distracted by the nature of the device that's cut her off from the runes of the Grimoire. Not in frustration or the like, but curiosity.

    Investigation of the polyhedral device that accomplished this will, however, have to wait. She closes her eyes with a sigh, "Honestly~. I know I bill myself as a humble witch, but surely you know I have more than one trick up my sleeve."

    With a flourish, she wrenches off her coat and casts it into the snow. While the fluffy coat made out of a multitude of reanimated weasels scurries across the snow directly for NAZCA-1's reinforcement, the witch lifts her hand to her face and sinks her teeth into the heel of her palm. Making a fist, the blood runs free, drooling into the pages of the Grimoire and yet somehow never staining them.

    "Magical geometry isn't the only trick someone like me has to levy a curse..." her tone is low, muttered. While the remaining two Space Revenants rocket after NAZCA-1 with the aid of their jetpacks, pursuing him with missile fire, those who had been destroyed by snipers and grenades start shuddering.

    Scattered bones and armor draw back together, amidst swirls of blood, reconstructing, smashing together. Four creatures are mashed together into one, including their equipment. As it rises to its feet, this Super Revenant unleashes a scream that doesn't stop, whirling on the sniper positions and firing out clusters of multiple muntions similar in scope to a shotgun. One after the other. Surely they will be shot down-- but with the artillery about to fire and allies being suppressed, any distraction is more than welcome.
Rita Ma      For a moment, Rita had worried whether the balaur would listen to her so easily. She needn't have. For once, the thing she's demanding may be in the monster's best interests, too.

     Mostly she huddles down with eyes scrunched tightly shut as pounding hail, crashing thunder, and roaring fire echo in her ears. Rita has rarely been so far in the air, and it's not good for her heart rate. Disembarking- which she does with an affectionate pat to the lizard's side- briefly feels like a relief.

     She drops into the shattered-glass space, lands in the snow below, and immediately shimmers into invisibility. There are a number of ways they could still track her, not least her footprints in the snow- but it only needs to buy her a heartbeat.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma breathes, "Don't look."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Please."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "For just a second."

     Rita finds the central point where she's within sixty feet of all three operatives (and ideally, closer). Once she's there, her active camouflage 'freezes' and then peels off in strips like a rendering error.

     For a flash, the girl in blue is visible beneath: a dress of scales, pale skin riven with aquamarine markings, branching gelatinous meat erupting from between the shoulderblades and that one horrible eye. Then half-cloaked tentacles cut like blades, slicing through the air with a whickering sound.

     She's aiming for their guns. Their bodies, she knows, are armored- but a firearm is less precious, and tougher to reinforce.

     Deprived of those, they won't be able to fight the balaur- she hopes- and they'll have to get in close with her.
Lilian Rook     Bond's target is having a very bad day. The former 007 is a better pilot than anything but the G.D.F's most senior aces, and has a lot more experience fighting human beings than monsters. His zoomed in feed shows him a glancing hit from the autocannon --itself no doubt the xenon-lorentz type-- has torn what must be an army right off, given the vivid splatter of red soaking into the snow.

    Another shot scrapes by as he banks away. A fourth punches through the fuselage, but only hits the electric rotor turbine that is shut off right now. The fifth merely skims a wing. The fact he can hit the VTOL at all is insane, but losing an arm and being forced to fire one-handed finally seems to have lowered the sniper's accuracy coefficient far enough to matter. The cluster bombs fall again. Several are turned to ash, but two are missed by inches. When the explosions go off below him, there is no return fire. The other two snipers are still trying to finish off Arthur and wound Lilian enough to stop her.

    They divert, just a moment, to shoot down Cantio's decoy drones, whilst Trudy summons. Then, pretty shortly, they are busy with defending themselves from the super revenant too. They're even skilled enough to slip some shots straight through a missile and to skewer the greater undead behind it, given the beams have enough energy to ash through a rocket and keep going, but only where they have the opportunity. And then the rest of the G.D.F squadron Bond had lead here crests over the lighthouse.

    They shudder as they come within jamming range, then smoothly swap to analogue backup as his craft had done. One is shot straight through the engine, and begins to spiral out of the air. The other four fire a hail of missiles and jam their autocannon triggers in response, splitting up two and two, not waiting to close range. There is no longer any opportunity for them to fire back on the Elites. They are stuck on total defense, moving as fast as they can to lower ground while shooting point defense, completely overwhelmed.

    The last shot fired Arthur's way suddenly diverts to the left-- no wait, the world actually shifted that way-- oh, no, he's been moved to the right, judging by the feeling of Lilian's arm under his. "I see Tamamo's work. You'll be okay." she says, practically right into his ear. "I still have some of hers. Let's get you back on your feet." Lilian adds, slapping one of her borrowed ofuda to his chest to speed his healing. "We're getting ahead of them. Keeping secrets all this time paid off. But we have to keep pressing. If you can still fight, I need you with me." She sounds dead serious, but there's a laboured quality to her breathing that might be the slightest cause for worry.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: If you can still fight, help her

    Arthur's hand raches to grasp Lilian's wrist. His grip is tight, almost unnaturally. It's half an intense focus, half a habitual nausea that comes with time manipulation as a space-aspect. "Might not be able to get us out of here." He says, through clenched teeth. "They've got wards. But you go, and I'm there to help. Same as ever." One deep breath. "Show me the skulls and I'll show you the cracks. You got details on the Third out of this shitshow?"

    Gotta make sure he's ready. If there's more fighting, he's going to need to help. With a series of heavy fist-clenches, he loads up a trinary system of suns orbiting his forearm, as if breach-loading a heavy weapon, and pulls the ripcord to get his broom active again. "We need to get somewhere?" An offer of a high-speed rushing ride for her, wherever she might need it.
Petra Soroka     Petra's eyes linger on Tamamo's for a moment, despite being inured against any compulsion to do so. She looks like she's searching for something, as the fox's fluff expands around her to fill the cockpit. She startles, belatedly, only noticing that Tamamo is talking to her after a few seconds.

    "I'm--yeah." She looks down, breaking eye contact. "A lot of the time I feel like it'd be better to have that kind of, soldier's insanity. It seems to make this stuff easier, for everyone else." She didn't need to admit that. Why did she? Rather than feeling comforting, the fox's tails encircling her feel like they're crushing her, wringing honesty out.

    Petra shivers, despite the warmth. She intently watches Tamamo's gestures on her Arthur-ified console, then squints and leans in.

    "What's that... weird bird symbol?" A heartbeat later, the balaur's fire streaks through the air overhead, and Petra jerks the Kana into motion as the debris of its lightning storm rains down on it. Rita's presence on the beast reassures and panics her in equal measure.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma breathes, "Don't look."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Please."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "For just a second."

    Whatever discomforting misgivings are brewing in Petra's stomach, she can confront later. She turns all of her attention to the snipers, blocking out her perception of everything else, and recalibrates the cannon to account for the Kana's shifting.

    "...Oh. Wait, you said that I'll hit no matter what, because of your magic?" Petra drops her hands into her lap midway through tinkering with the aiming, then slowly wraps her fingers around the cannon's trigger. Deep breath.

    "Firing one."

    The boom of the Ekanamsha's cannon blots out the gunfire and comparatively tinny blasts of the other explosives, announcing her presence to anyone who wasn't already aware. Deep breath. Stay focused. "Firing two."
Lilian Rook     NAZCA 1, as Tamamo's opinions on insanity reach, hasn't given up. Not long after Trudy's personal army is mostly tied up in being a giant monster, she catches the creak of a carbon cable behind her, and the snow at her back explodes. The commando collides with the ground from directly over her, having broken line of sight and then re-anchored and swung above, where people seldom look, to sneak attack her.

    It's a completely insane gambit, but all too severe if Trudy intends to live rather than just win. A trio of incredibly lethal energy blasts crash against her from point blank, and a superhumanly swift and strong, lunging CQC takedown follows. The vibroblade, stained with Ishirou's and Cantio's blood, goes for her next, flashing out to carve through her neck and spine. This may be the first time she's ever met someone in this world who wasn't afraid of mages without being one.

    The rocks Ishirou manipulates mostly buy him a split seconds by intercepting the beam fire and blowing up. Finally, the first thing that NAZCA isn't ready for, is him purging his armour, and he slides low through the snow, between the man's legs in his firing stance. The commando blocks the drill with the flat of his rifle, letting off the screech of metal tearing into metal, before he finally wrestles it asides and deflects it. He spins around to face Ishirou just as the scanner lunges, and lashes out with the butt of his rifle to crack Ishirou's skull from the side with lightning quickness.

    He trades this blow in the end, as Ishirou's blades find their mark in his armour. The commando had made a pretty good gamble, seeing as the weapons are unable to pierce through his suit and inflict serious damage on his flesh. Three quarters of his equipment shuts down mere moments later (though a handful of implants mysteriously remain functional). The hacked connection, apparently wired to a skull implant, intercepts the man's stream of conscious telepathic communication, both sending and receiving, and spills it out onto the radio.

    "--no joy anti-spatial and anti-magic measures. Eigencausal paradigm confirmed. Fatal Black is designated as the First. --NAZCA three and four are down. Seven, eight, nine, pinned down. --Reinforcement profile indicates the G.D.F was tipped off; spotted Triglav-34s and at least one Solomari. --Committing any further is deemed inadvisable at this time. Odds of neutralizing escort is below forty percent. Extent of the First's power profile is unknown and indicates significantly greater mastery of mechanics than the Fourth. --New squadrons will be mobilizing within four minutes. Abort pursuit. We will sustain unacceptable losses if we don't exfiltrate ahead of the G.D.F's mobilization. Break off at discretion and Rendezvous with Blue Team at--
Cantio Now that she's (momentarily) out of harm's way, Cantio can take a quick assessment of how much damage she's actually suffered. Her arm certainly hurts like hell from the knife that's still in there (probably a nice souvenir once she gets some time to take it apart), but that seems to have been the worst of it compared to the rest of her body. Even the area of her chest where she had gotten shot so many times is faring better thanks to the denser armor protecting her center mass compared to her limbs, but she still needs a moment to get some healing magic going to numb the pain before she can get her head back into the fight.

She doesn't need to waste much time trying to figure out where to aim next, though, thanks to her sword bits still being around. Even though she has to control them manually, she keeps them chasing after NAZCA-1, working in tandem with Trudy's Space Revenants to come at him from multiple angles to prevent any cover from being all that useful for long.

Cantio doesn't remain in the ground forever, of course, but she doesn't personally pursue NAZCA-1 any further. Instead, she regroups with Trudy, offering her healing if needed and otherwise using those sword bits as an extension of herself to keep forcing NAZCA-1 into more painful trades as she keeps aiming to carve parts off of him and bore holes into him with that unrelenting pursuit.
Trudy Grimm     A gambit that intends to pressure Trudy Grimm out of the fight if she is concerned with her own life fails to account for how little Trudy Grimm values her own life.

    Energy shots bury themselves into her (actually un-alive) coat, searing fur and colliding with the reanimated lifeforms that make it up. Blood is drawn and the witch staggers but does not collapse, steadying herself by shifting her footing. Blood splatters the snow around her-- She's already turning when NAZCA-1 is upon her, though his lethal use of the vibroblade finds itself fouled up by-- the weasels.

    One of those errant heads bites his wrist, then wraps around it. The entire jacket sloughs off the Witch's body and onto his, wrapping around his face and arm like a fluffy Facehugger. The Grimoire is released, floating beside Trudy when she grabs onto NAZCA's forearm with both hands. Whirling, she wheels him around and releases him, weasel coat and all.

    The colossal fused Many-Revenant, losing pieces of itself but no less ferocious, ceases its bombardment of the snipers when its mistress is assaulted. When she shoves NAZCA-1 forward, the Greater Undead rears back an arm comprised of multitudes of smaller arms, then punches straight downward at the top of his weasel-wrapped head.

    And if the first blow connects, the Greater Revenant does not stop until either NAZCA-1 or itself stop moving. A bloodied Witch, now coat-less, pants as she collects the Grimoire in one hand, reaching the other into its pages.
Lilian Rook     The Ekanashma finally fires. The shot comes from behind the mountain, and the shells have no guidance to speak of. From that range, the heat from their firing bleeds off them in the frigid air, rendering them both invisible against the night sky, and invisible to thermals. Bond, from the air, spies one of the shells land right on top of a fleeing target, hurling metallic debris in several directions and triggering another localized avalanche, either gravely wounding or killing the commando instantly.

    The second, deploying his own night-black forcefield to block the second shot, indicates something else; he must have already sensed his companion was wounded or killed. They've been sharing each other's senses this entire time too. Given a little more prep time to muster their forces, a nine unit pincer attack might have gone much worse. One of the VTOLs breaks off to confirm a kill, whilst the other three form up on chasing the NAZCA sniper still on the run. A beam slices through one of them, severing its ammunition link, but the chase turns low altitude and curves behind the next mountain.

    Rita drops into the fray on site 281. The ground is so molten hot that it blisters her feet. The air feels unbreathable. With everything turned to shimmer and haze, though, her active camo is completely impossible to see, and thermals are now completely useless. The commandos are still shooting at the balaur, wheeling back to break off-- its wounds are slowly starting to regenerate, so it probably plans to hit and run them in alarmingly cunning fashion. That leaves them distracted from where Rita's feet hit snow instead of glass.

    Rita's tentacles slice three guns to pieces. One falls apart into the snow in neat chunks. Another splits in half, venting a geyser of purple steam and sparks. The third violently explodes where her tentacle strikes a concealed portion of the glowing 'rod', hurling the commando backwards, but catching her alien limb in the blast. Wearing no shielded armour to speak of, Rita somehow 'conducts', and feels wild energies coursing down her tentacle as if she had jammed it into a power socket, crashing into where it joins her back before dissipating fully. The tentacle itself is pretty much charcoal, though that means little to Rita beyond the excruciating pain. The more serious risk is temporary spinal or cardiac paralysis from the current.

     The two soldiers who simply lost their guns stagger back, and react to her without thought, drawing sidearms --now nakely visible with their arctic camo wear burnt away-- and pouring fire into her whilst smoothly backing up away. The third, knocked over by the blast, rolls over on his side, reaches to a hail-dented compartment, and throws a cylindrical grenade; by the looks of it, Rita instinctively notices how similar it looks to one of Liza's 'bioterror' canisters.

    It's a perfect time for Arthur, courtesy to Lilian, to show up, between Rita and the commandos, facing the enemy. It gives him three targets right off the bat.

    --two gone silent. MIA. NAZCA Five retreating.--Confirmed additional hostiles, code lavender. --Hazel alert! Hazel alert! Signal matches Tree of Completion! They must have reactivated the Centaur! Abort! Abort! Get the hell out of there!
Ishirou The gun smashes Ishirou across the skull.  He staggers and falls.  Ishirou's head is ringing, and pounding loudly, but...BUT...

The dagger hit.

With the communication spilling out onto the radio, his ear ringing only becomes a low roar.  He staggers to his feet, standing up and staring down (or probably up) the soldier.  He has to make this right...he has to know what their plan is, and he has to warn Lilian.  His head hurts, blood is streaming down his forehead, and a welt is forming.

POD indicates a concussion, a potentially cracked skull, and a list of other afflictions.  He's hurt, he's angry, he's embarrassed...he feels like he just failed the entire group.  "Tell. Me. Everything." he demands and tries to simply drain the information out of the man through vicious biohacking.  

He wants to know everything.  Their exact goal, and their extraction method.  Who this other team is, and where are their meet-up and fallback points?  He wants everything he can get, and the safety of this person means nothing to him.  So shaken up Ishirou is at this moment that he's willing to hurt another person severely just to do this...

His hands shake as he probes.  He's not even sure if his own head can handle this with the brain damage...but he has to try.
Tamamo     Rita Ma breathes, 'Don't look.'

    Tamamo is only looking at the consoles inside the Kana, right now, packed in with her space-filling fluff. Rita is safe. Although... there's still the bit of Rita she kept.

    'It seems to make this stuff easier, for everyone else.'

    "Would you be a soldier, then, fighting for a cause? To kill the weakness within oneself is one method of survival." Tamamo says that immediately, not quite casually, but as if it only takes a portion of her attention. She's looking elsewhere.

    'What's that... weird bird symbol?' A heartbeat later...

    "More of a serpent than a bird, I would rather say. Another land would call, 'dragon.'" A light pause, and Tamamo says, "Oh, so that is the route Ms. Rita took to join us."

    '...Oh. Wait, you said that I'll hit no matter what, because of your magic?'

    "Should there be one chance within eight thousand that you reach your goal, I shall find you that single thread." The chosen number may be an understatement, despite its specificity. "Try, and you will succeed."
James Bond      Bond takes the place of the downed plane, keying into the radio as he ascends overtop the defensive split that's formed. He'd picked up their callsign designations earlier, and had given himself one that wouldn't conflict with the rest. In staticky bursts, he coordinates. "Strelets-Two confirms one hostile down, with additional targets."

     Bond--'Strelets-Two'--has taken several hits, but none that'd force him from the air. It's concerning, but the reinforcements from the GDF should help considerably, if they can be brought up to speed quickly. Flicking an insturment panel out of habit, he does exactly that. "Strelets Three, Four, Five, Six, get your noses up--" Three is hit, flying without an ammunition link.

     "Focus fire one hostile at a time, no disengagement until kills are confirmed. Suspect hostiles are enhanced humans. Strelets-Three, I'm with you. Strelets-Four, Five, Six, look one-point-six kilometers from next-highest peak."

     Taking up with two of the craft, Bond leads them into approaching the southern sniper that'd revealed themselves to try and pick off Cantio. "Strelets-Three, I have visual on ammunition link damage. Take the perch, employ cluster bombs. Forming a defensive split with you around the opposite side of the mountain." The Ekanamsha's shell strikes a retreating commando. "Be advised," he says, suppressing the urge to make a tastelss pun about the man being buried with work, "Friendly armor is on-site."

     Working with the other fighter around the bend, Bond flies wingman, making an aggressive and hard-to-predict series of arbitraty speed increases, yaws, skids and rolls to try and frustrate the retreating sniper's aim as much as possible. It's risky, still leaving him open to a lucky shot (and these guys certainly don't seem to need luck to hit their targets). Still, the working autocannon from his craft, combined with the bombs from the other, made into a pincer, should prove very difficult to withstand on the backfoot.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Be involved in the Rita Ma fight

    Arthur Lowell is now in the Rita Ma fight. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know what is happening. All he knows is he must thrash. Human reaction time is 250 miliseconds for visual stimulus, plus processing time. The people in NAZCA Squadron have demonstrated reaction times as low as 15 miliseconds. If you fudge the numbers real hard, you must come to the conclusion that this brainless boy has somehow wired his eyeballs to his fighting fists.

>Arthur: Break knees, break noses, break spirits

    He doesn't know what's happening with the weather, or the monster, or with Rita. In fact, he's not even looking at her. He's got a readied action to fight, and fight is what he's doing, rocket-blasting straight towards the nearest of the trio and turning structurally sound bone into structurally unsound splinters with his gamer shouts and yells.

    He doesn't have the health to keep focus. His yelling is hoarse, exhausted, pained. There's not much creativity in screaming, "FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!" These telepaths and their outward-silence give Arthur the impression he won't get much out of them, not more than he'd get out of the Autumn Angel. Better, he thinks, to act as Lilian's surprise attack and a kind of highly focused berserker. Surely this is not a mere rationalization for more satisfying violence.
Lilian Rook     NAZCA 1 is not exactly having a difficult time cutting through weasels, undead or otherwise, though it takes him an extra instance to slash them out of their air with a flurry of overlapping cuts in gleaming arcs. Instants matter in combat. Trudy hurls him away. The giant revenant swings its fist. He's right under it.

    NAZCA 1 hurls his knife towards Trudy in the space of a blink, then reaches out with his black metal arm, and catches the enormous blow head on. His knees bend. The ground cannot, and fractures beneath him. Trudy can hear his rising growl through the vocalizer turn into a surprisingly fierce, hot-blooded yell. His grip tightens around the super revenants, and then shatters two of its fingers, allowing him crunch a fist. The second he does, his sleeve tears apart as the arm beneath it unfolds, slates of black metal blooming outwards like petals, exposing the hissing and sparking rod of violet light withing.

    He slams the fist into the revenant's palm. His arm collapses back together. A tremendous blast of energy runs up its arm and into its torso; probably enough to blow it to pieces in a ridiculous shower of bone fragments and purple fire. His prosthetic vents enormous quantities of vapour. He turns to look at Trudy again, flipping through her grimoire.

    And thinks better of it. His armour thrusters flare again, the cable snaps out, and he vanishes straight down the mountainside, into the terraformed black valley below.

    Ishirou has a few hard-won moments where his opponent is genuinely compromised, and he can hear his every thought. It's not enough to download a comprehensive manifesto, especially not through those mental defenses, but enough to skim the shape of some things. The Third Child. Tree of Completion; the Hazel Tree. Oreshnika Svyatoy. Northern Ural range. Sector officially marked as a 'grave' of 'Mat' Prizrakov'. Two teams of nine, dispersed to avoid detection, set to converge on the target point ahead of the Russian G.D.F. Goal: extraction of VIP to safe holding, where 'the Fourth Child' is. Tree of Perfection; the Ash Tree. They're related somehow.

    The words 'Abort! Abort! Get the hell out of there!' are still ringing in Ishirou's ears when the man in front of him ceases to exist. A star overhead flares brilliant. Below it, a column of space snaps out of alignment with its surroundings. A bone-breaking blast of air hits Ishirou dead on, displaced from right in front of him. The mountainside in a thirty meter radius, of which the commando is just barely on the edge, converts into a perfectly circular, perfectly flat, mirror smooth and polished level plane, and it does so with the sound of a bomb going off. The man inside is instantaneously converted into a paper thin film of pressed gore extending for meters.

    Ears ring with far off non-words in the shape of un-language. What Arthur hears is

My dearest thanks, o shining one
I bid you rest, your task is done
Ishirou POD calls out the warning, but Ishirou was too far into the hacking...

Moments later, the bone-cracking force of pressure blasts him down the mountain.  He goes through trees, rocks, and snow, and finally comes to a stop at the bottom of the hill.  If he wasn't concussed before...he sure is now.  If it wasn't for the R.E.S.C.U.E. unit he'd be very dead right now...but thankfully he does and he isn't.  

"POD...inject pain meds, I need to stay awake...I have to..."

"Acknowledged, Ishirou concussed, keep awake until proper medical care can be arranged," Ishirou feels the drugs injecting into his system, enough to keep him aware...and dull the pain slightly.  
Rita Ma      Rita crumples onto her side with a stifled scream, her legs briefly giving out from the tentacle-conducted shock. Even now, she clamps a hand over her mouth to keep from worrying anyone.

     She's barely looking, but even while she's collapsed, a tentacle seemingly acting on its own recognizance grabs that biohazard canister five feet after it leaves the agent's hand and hurls it off into the far distance.

     Then they draw sidearms on her, and she shakily raises her free hand against them. A spherical forcefield of crackling energy snaps into existence around her with the gesture, and the projectiles splash and diffuse against it as she pulls her tentacles back. If they had their main arms, it might be different.

     She's still breathing heavily from the pain when Arthur appears in front of her, and she's forced to hastily re-weave her disguise- sans one tentacle- before he can turn around. He's seen it before, but that's no excuse to let him see it again (and even the realization that Lilian must have seen her in stopped time, to put him there, makes her wince).

     When the forcefield snaps off and Rita staggers to her feet again, she makes her way over to the agent downed by the exploding gun, grabs him by the neck, and throws him a hundred feet into the air towards the balaur.

     Finish him.

     Arthur may intend otherwise, but as for the remaining two he's battering, Rita is very likely faster than them and has no intention of letting them escape alive. She'll have to do it with her bare hands, but failing all else, armor generally can't do much against simply being pulled apart like shredded pork.
Trudy Grimm     Instants matter. Trudy hurls NAZCA-1 into the Super Revenant's clutches. While he's doing an utterly admirable job contending with the monstrosity, shattering fingers made out of forearms and then blasting apart the entire fist, arm, and shoulder. The monster is already drawing back its other arm, bringing that down as well just as the first fist is blasted apart.

    Trudy Grimm lurches with the hurled knife strikes her shoulder, throwing out another spray of dark blood. Her hand wrenches free of the Grimoire, clutching something black, metal, and familiar. The witch thrusts this out.

    But NAZCA-1 is already retreating, flying down the mountain, leaving the Witch standing there aiming a Glock G7 after him in blood-slicked hands, panting for breath.

    After a moment, she straightens her posture, shoving the handgun back into her Grimoire. Tentatively, she clutches the knife embedded in her body, pulling it out in a bloody spray. This is examined-- and then dropped into the grimoire as well.

    Trudy exhales slowly, glancing towards Cantio when she's joined. A bloody mess of a girl. Her eyes shift up the mountain to the lightshow going on near the lighthouse, then further down the mountain with a snap at the colossal loud sound from where Ishirou had gone. Letting out a tired noise, she gestures. The scattered, broken bones of Revenants crawl together, forming this time into a squat, mult-limbed thing that she climbs onto, scuttling down the mountain to rendesvous with Ishirou.
Petra Soroka     Both of the shells land. Petra tightens her lips, imagining what Tamamo's magically guided direct hits with the Kana's shells would do to even a reinforced supersoldier. Or, she tries to imagine it, at least. Her mind keeps slipping off of the subject, unable to commit to the task of visualizing the carnage that she's responsible for.

    The Kana rocks backwards, stretching its frozen legs into a standing position. The joints screech, Petra eases up on the controls, settling the legs back into their prescribed angles. Stretching is a reflex that the Kana isn't designed for.

    "Um... what next?" Petra says out loud, unclear whether she's talking to herself or Tamamo. She begins scanning the battlefield for anyone still struggling, but pauses abruptly, realizing that she might accidentally glance over Rita's skirmish.

    After a silent internal debate, respecting Rita's wishes wins out over giving her a hand. Though... Petra feels like accepting that Rita is strong enough to take on three NAZCA soldiers at once somehow betrays that privacy, too. Acknowledging... whatever it is, that Rita doesn't want her to see.

    The Kana trundles to the lighthouse, offering a warm rendezvous point for all the combatants. Inside, Petra's wrapped her scarf around her face again, hiding the sweat drenching her forehead and the bloody streaks of her bit lip.
Lilian Rook     NAZCA 7 8 and 9 are stuck fighting Rita, Lilian, and Arthur, three on three, without their primary weapons and half their gear. Even if all three of the Elites are wounded, the NAZCA detachment is in deep shit.

    Beams splash against Rita's forcefield. The canister lands, and shrouds her in toxic smoke. Her tentacles, extended beyond her shield, burn and blister and become envenomed, but one of the commandos is hurled high into the air, just as the golden demon circles back. His maneuvering thrusters fire, taking him out of the way of a fivefold blast of flame, only to be smashed out of the air with a brake of its wings and a heavy strike from its talons, sending him plummeting into the valley at terminal velocity.

    Arthur rushes at the remaining two like a berserker. Freshly healed, the handguns still hurt like hell, and gouge terrible chunks out of his health bar, but aren't enough to drop him before he collides with them. Lilian is alongside him, absorbing a point blank shot to her chest, sparking on her scorched armour, just so she can bring Night Mist straight down through his gun and sever his hand. Both of them are able to draw knives, but Arthur's pure aggression and gravitically-enhanced blows are too much for his enemy to handle, and the vibrating blade shatters under the assault, a rib-cracking blow sending him tumbling down the icy mountain and into the dark.

    Lilian's vastly better reach and skill in bladed combat disarms the second, breaks his leg, and severs his gear belt, whereupon he makes like NAZCA 1 and fires his grapnel and thruster both, only to be interrupted by the line suddenly being cut, and blasted away by Arthur shortly thereafter.

    Bond's relentless pursuit is far too much for the fleeing sniper to handle. Between his coordinated attack with the other craft, flashing their acknowledge lights to his HUD as the interference is cleared, there's barely a spare moment for him to shoot back, his Red Alpine run turning into a desperate dancer of escape between the murderous strafes of cannon fire and bombing. The final remaining sniper flees into the terraformed lower mountain forest, and that seems to be a convincing reason for the other aircraft to peel off, though, that in of itself raises the question of why NAZCA team seems so confident in being there.

    One of the snipers is probably dead. Another is badly wounded if he isn't dead too. The team leader has retreated. One of his ground cohort is paste. Another had been beaten unconscious in the forest (though, at this point he might have fled as well). One of the reinforcement unit is either dead or wounded far beyond recovery either way. The other two are MIA, one crippled. 'Red Team', according to what Ishirou knows, has lost roughly half of its battle readiness from the engagement.

    It's a good result on the surface. Ruminating on the odds, however, the fact that they weren't completed wiped out is alarming, and the survivors will no doubt relay all of the intelligence they've gathered to the other team, and draw up plans.
Lilian Rook     With contact broken on all hostiles, the Strelet squadron begins peeling off and coming back to the lighthouse, broadly circling the area whilst new dots appear on the horizon; the G.D.F's occupational reinforcements, no doubt. The balaur is off doing its own thing. The cloud of toxic smoke around Rita disperses in an anomalous, friendly wind. Strength and life begins to fill her from the inside out, as the air sparkles around her for no apparent reason, though she could swear she feels eyes on the back of her neck. Lilian plants her sword, leans on the crossguard, and then processes the radio talk, and rushes over to the Kana, having a fit about Tamamo being inside, saying something that includes 'You don't know what she does in there!'.

    It isn't too long after that, when the whine of rotors and engines is at its peak, and the original craft return to be repaired, that Lilian gathers up Ishirou, brings him for healing, and then acknowledges Trudy's request and pings Bond to confirm a body somewhere. Whilst he searched, she adds "Keep the craft. You won't get off the hook if they find out about you anyways. While all of us are here, we need to move out as soon as we can. Those men aren't slow, and if they get to Oreshnika before us, it won't take them too long to make off with our only lead. At minimum, we need to get out of sight of aerial recon from the G.D.F, before they start asking who the little people on the ground are."

    Lilian grimaces, recalling Ishirou's news. "I know where we're headed, at least. Arx Zenith has records on it. The site where the God-class Antegent was defeated on the Russian content. The Mother of Ghosts."